The summer I turned into a bookworm

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1:01Now to the grill on the Opel on Saturday, 24 January, with your partner. More on opel.de.

1:23I'm John Glenn Hill. This is Explained to Me. And I think one of the best parts of summer is Love Island. I love to call myself a sensitive gangster, so here I am crying again. But that's over now, so it's time for the second best part. Grabbing a book and sitting outside by someone's pool. Usually I go for the it book of the summer, think you're Brit Bennett or Emma Klein, or a medium to spicy romance novel, something along the lines of Jasmine Guillory or Talia Hibbert. It's fun. It's an escape from the doom scroll, and it just feels right. But how did summer reading become such a thing? Before we dive into that, we wanted to hear from some readers about why and what they read in the summer.

2:07So we sent our producer, Avishai Artsy, on a quest to find readers. Okay, Avishai, set the scene for us. What did you find? Hey, JQ. Yeah, so I went to a meeting of a group called the Silver Lake Reading Club. Welcome, everyone. This is our 85th reading club. It's not in the scene. 85. So this group meets every Tuesday evening at a cafe or restaurant here in Los Angeles, and they read together. So like silently, but next to each other, they're just, they're reading together? Right, yeah. Yeah, there's some breaks for socializing, but otherwise they read for two 45-minute stretches. And then at the end, they might have an author come and do a reading and sign books.

2:53But yeah, you could just imagine like a couple dozen people sitting at tables or in armchairs, sometimes in a group or just by themselves. And they're just engrossed in their books. There's soft music playing. It's very serene, very calm. And The Reading Club was founded by Helen Bowie. And she says she's really blown away by how successful it's been. In total, we've had 2 ,000 people come to Reading Club since we started. and they've read a total of 5 ,000 books at our evenings together, which is pretty amazing if you think people in LA don't read. The events sell out every week and now Helen is forming a non-profit and is going to even start a kids reading club as well.

3:34All of this sounds really awesome, but why go to a silent book club instead of, you know, just taking your book and reading it on your own? Yeah, I wondered that too, especially because it does cost$20 to attend and that money does go towards the space. They usually rent out the cafe or the restaurant just for these events. But still, that's, you know, real money to show up somewhere and just read your book. So I asked some of the attendees, why do you come here? And we stepped outside of the reading club. So you'll hear traffic noise just because I didn't want to disrupt people while they were reading quietly.

4:05That's very polite of you. I grew up loving reading. I was an avid reader and fell out of the habit. And so just having a dedicated time to read and focus on just that has been really nice. I would just self-describe myself as an introverted person. And so for me, I love this socialization. This sounds so crazy, but sometimes I almost feel like I'm doing myself a disservice by reading. Like I should be like out doing something else with other people or being more social or whatever. And this bridges that gap in that ridiculous anxiety in a nice way. You know, I really love this idea of reading as a social activity.

4:45You know, we're both in book clubs, and I really just love reading a book and being able to dissect it afterwards with my friends. What did these readers have to say about what makes for a good summer read? Yeah, I asked them about that. And I should note that I'm in Los Angeles, which doesn't have as defined seasons as other parts of the United States. But we do still have summer, and we do like to read in the summer. So some of the attendees shared their thoughts about what they look for in a good summer book. I approach summer reading like Love Island. I need to read the hottest books of the summer.

5:19So I just finished Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and it was so incredible and amazing binge read. In the fall, I gravitate toward things like fantasy and mystery and like that cozy kind of stuff. Whereas in the summer, I would say I'm a mix of a literary fiction reader and some romance thrown in there. I definitely think about maybe like locational reading, like beach reading or vacation reading, which then I'll go for something easier or funny or like rom-com-y as opposed to like something a little bit more intense. And I guess that's the summer vibe. It's like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires.

5:59That's the vibe. Ooh, breezy lesbian vampires. That's amazing. And as to why we might like to read in the summer, here's what folks have to say. I think because it's ingrained in our childhood. You know, we always had summer reading lists, whether you were in sixth grade or a freshman in college. And I think it's always that time where you feel like you can kind of rest a little bit more if you're lucky and just pick up a few more books. So I think it's just something that's been ingrained in us since since we were kids, very much like a summer vacation. You see what happening with Love Island where everybody's watching it every night.

6:34I feel like that's the same bond you get with reading, especially if you're reading off the summer lists. You have other people that you know that you can talk to immediately about something crazy that happened in the book. I feel like reading more in the summer, I think my body's a little more conditioned to it, and I'm more prone to stay out later in the daylight with a book. And I think the last piece of summer reading is I think people are finding time to escape and literature is that outlet. And I think if you combine that actually right now with what's going on in just our atmosphere, then you'll find that people are looking to escape even more.

7:18And literature has always been there for us. And it is more important than ever now.

7:26Okay, Avishai, thank you so much for taking us to the Silver Lake Reading Club. I loved hearing their theories on why we do summer reading. There is a little more to it, though. And we've talked to the woman who wrote the book on how summer reading became a thing. That's after the break.

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10:44We're talking summer reads, so it's only right to talk to the woman who wrote the book about him. I'm Donna Harrington Luker, and I'm the author of a book on summer reading called Books for Idle Hours. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Were we always like, oh my gosh, it's hot out. Guess I gotta, like, grab a book. No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century, and I started kind of way back looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers and the like. And I kind of divided into two periods, before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

11:25Before the Civil War, it's definitely constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb, of all things, for summer reading. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first 70 ,000 ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. From Charles Lamb's A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig. Poetry was mentioned often as well. It all changes after the Civil War.

12:13After the Civil War, there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of Sommel Leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class. So you have many, many more people engaging in this tradition or in this practice. And you have an increase in railroads as well. And hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. And it takes a very, very specific form. And increasingly, it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. So it kind of has its beginnings in the 19th century. and in a middle-class desire for learning how to perform summer leisure the way an elite class, a moneyed class, already did.

13:04Yeah, can you talk about that performance a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Yeah, publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the kind of central things was what I was calling the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May. It would be set at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. And it would involve kind of a courtship novel. And over the course of the novel, over the narrative arc, two young people would meet.

13:44They would resolve their differences. They would visit various places, and at the end they would be married. I think one of the most popular novels of the period definitely kind of showcased this. It was called One Summer by an author by the name of Blanche Willis Howard, who was very prominent in the day, in the 19th century. And it involves, at the very, very start, the young woman, the heroine of this novel. She doesn't have a summer novel to read, and so she goes out on a rainy night. She goes to the drugstore to buy a novel for entertainment. She accidentally bumps into a young man and nearly blinds him with her umbrella.

14:23Oh. She moved towards him with an expression of sincerest regret upon her lips. Her remark was however unspoken, for the stranger at the same moment advanced, and in a gentlemanly voice said, My good woman. Good woman indeed, she thought indignantly, and with a sudden revulsion of feeling, Her sympathy is giving way to wounded pride of station. Does he take me for a milkmaid? And so from that start, needless to say, they have to get over a certain animosity. It's kind of Beatrice and Benedict from Shakespeare time. He is trying to woo her. She is resisting. And over the course of the novel, they finally indeed do admit their love for each other.

15:11The other part of the arc was that it took you through the various things you could do at the different resorts. There'd be a plot development at the toboggan ride at Saratoga, or there would be the ending when the couple comes together would be celebrated by fireworks set off at Bar Harbor, Maine. So by reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure. There's also a good bit of fashion for the young woman. You'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. So they're really serving two functions here. That's so interesting.

15:49So it sounds like it's serving the purpose kind of a mixture of like Hallmark movie with your romance, but like the drama and intrigue of like White Lotus. That's what it seems like. Definitely the hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely, definitely on that. I think over the course of the reading, I only uncovered two novels, summer novels, that were kind of aimed at men. And they moved very, very differently than for the young women. And one of them takes place in California at a resort there in kind of the wintertime rather than the summertime. And every chapter is based on a different animal or bird that needs to be shot at and eaten.

16:33So very, very different perspective and different gendered perspective here. Very. Were these books purely escapists or did they get at larger themes too? Yes, they are escapists in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle. but they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt and between. And for young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of what does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman? Because there was markedly more freedom, or at least as these books constructed it, during the summer and at summer resorts so that you have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned.

17:21And so opening up vistas of freedom. Now, admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel, there are more freedoms. And the novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch. There's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation building in a way as well. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands.

18:06Early, say, post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates, especially among young women. But you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. One of the people that I talk about is the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmadge. He was a major voice against summer reading, basically saying that summer reading as literary poison in August. Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning someday when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered romances?

18:52The hero, a Parisian roue, the heroine, an unprincipled flirt. Chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of$100 a line. I really believe there is more pestiferous trash read amongst the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other 10 months of the year. So that kind of clerical concern about what novel reading does to young women, that had to be overcome. And so they've got to kind of shift the focus that it has to become, light reading has to become a pleasure reading. It has to become an escape from the dangers of, or the pressures of modern life, and even for young women.

19:44And they're very successful. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing now? I mean, the idea of summer reading as marketing, it's still with us today. It may have lost its idea of schooling a middle class in the performance of summer leisure. But as a marketing strategy, it is still here today. This week, each host is giving her summer reading list in a series we like to call Ladies Get Lit. Are you on the hunt for a good summer read? Well, look no further. Summer reading season is almost upon us, which means it's time for a visit. Book talk is going to be an important influence here as well.

20:23So it persists as a marketing effort. Absolutely. The lists that I've seen all kind of include novels, but then also important fiction. We're living in difficult times. And I think that the recommendations for nonfiction, the ones that I've seen, have been fairly substantial. And I think they kind of reflect that. It's just a different marketing world now. And in the 19th century, you had probably four or five tastemaking publications. and they were the places that you went to get your recommendations for what to read next and to get your judgments. And that kind of centralization doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

21:05All right. Thanks so much for explaining this to us. Okay. Thank you so much. That's Donna Harrington-Luker. She's the author of Books for Idle Hours, 19th Century Publishing, and the Rise of Summer Reading. Coming up, the case for getting serious about summer reading.

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23:34We're back with Explain It To Me. And when you hear summer book, you might be thinking of something light. And I guess that's the summer vibe. It's like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires. That's the vibe. But what about a big old classic? That's what one listener who called in is doing. My name is Heather. I'm a writer living in New York, and I host a live reading series and podcast, both of which are called Limousine, with my friend and co-host and fellow writer, whose name is Leah. And for our podcast, we usually interview writers about their career and stuff like that. But this summer, we actually decided to do an Anna Karenina book club.

24:14I called them up to hear why. I think it like, it weirdly does suit itself to the summer because the summer feels like a time where things are a little bit slower and we have more free time. Even if we don't actually have more free time, there's like often like the illusion of free time because you'll go on vacation, like a vacation that you've been planning all year. So you have time off work or like the days are longer or like maybe you actually do do the kind of work that like slows down over the summer stuff like that and ironically it feels like spending time with like a massive classic that takes all of your attention is almost more indulgent than you know reading something that's short and frothy and quick that you actually probably could read when you're busier um it feels almost like more leisurely and more um more indulgent to like take time on this like really huge impractical thing to be reading, you know?

25:06Yeah. Okay. With that in mind, you told us in your voicemail that you decided to do something different with your podcast this summer. What are y 'all doing this summer? This summer, we're basically breaking down Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. And we're doing every two weeks, we're reading a different part. So if you're familiar, it's a massive book. It's an eight part book. And yeah, just every other week. We're dissecting a part. We're talking about it with everybody in our Discord. We're posting memes about all of the sections. And yeah, just like building a little community around reading Anna Karenina.

25:42What made you all pick Anna Karenina? I think we both had this feeling that one, I mean, it's one of those books that like you have to read before you die. Like we both had felt like, oh, we want to read this. And it might be fun to do like a book club version since it's a doorstop. It's quite literally massive. And it's easier if you break it down and have some like, friends and accountability. And then as soon as we said it, we just started noticing people in the wild were reading it. And I do think like, that's not, you know, necessarily a coincidence. Like people are looking for something longer, something classic right now to challenge themselves to spend time away from their phones.